Noises Off...

Noises Off is a raucous, riotous romp that will leave you delightfully giddy from the wonderful on-screen frenzy and non-stop laughs. It's the kind of comedy we haven't seen in a while, one that doesn't rely on righteous dudes or far-out babes to make us laugh. It's all silly farce, played out by an effective ensemble of screen and TV actors. [19 March 1992]

Peter Bogdanovich has cracked the tough nut of "opening up" the Tony Award-winning hit "Noises Off" for the silver screen. Namely, he has essentially filmed the play in a series of long-cut scenes and it works splendidly. Moviegoers will be delighted by this sharply calibrated farce. Buena Vista's challenge will be to lure audiences who don't have a knowledge of this ensemble's Broadway pedigree. [20 March 1992]

Peter Bogdanovich's brilliant direction (on a par with his classic comedy, ''What's Up, Doc?'') has brought a successful adaptation of a stage farce to the screen, conquered the problems of the play-within-a-play format and most important, has lost almost none of the laughs of Michael Frayn's original play. As a result, ''Noises Off'' brings laughter from start to finish because Bogdanovich has captured the essence of physical farce and blended it perfectly with superlative comic dialogue. [24 March 1992, p.4D]

Bogdanovich has judged his approach to the material astutely, resisting impulses toward comic overkill or transferring focus away from the stage. He takes his cue from the actors, and the camera is always in the right place. Read full review

The movie, when it finally gets going, is funny. At times it's hysterical. The great discovery about Noises Off is how tried and tested Frayn's basic formula is. The physical, verbal and situation comedy is universal, no matter who the performers. What counts in this ensemble production is the collective choreography, the great farce machine. In the movie, everyone, Reeve included, more than plays his part. Read full review

People seeing Peter Bogdanovich's version of Michael Frayn's clockwork farce might find it hard to believe that the Broadway show, under Michael Blakemore's direction, was twice as funny as the movie. It was. But the movie happens to be twice as funny as anything else around. Read full review

The transition from stage to screen may be bumpy in spots, but this movie is much funnier than Bogdanovich's What's Up, Doc?, and the long-take shooting style is executed with fluidity and precision. Read full review

Bogdanovich films Noises Off in long, unbroken takes. Though for the most part he doesn't give us the whole stage but moves in to follow the action more closely, the camera moves as one's eyes might, while following the play. Bogdanovich does what he has to -- he gets out of the way of Frayn's original farce. And the result of his thankless toil is a movie that doesn't quite feel like a movie, and that's not quite as good as the play, but that's pretty good anyway. [20 March 1992, p.D5]

Burnett is probably the most interesting here, but not by much. John Ritter is fun, Marilu Henner is sexy enough to hold her own even while Nicollette Sheridan, who is lovely, colts about the stage in lingerie. Julie Hagerty, as a steadily more nervous stage manager, is the scariest and funniest; Denholm Elliott, the barely reformed boozer who chases every bottle that turns up backstage (and many, many do), is a hoot...The whole thing vibrates with its dark possibilities: Utter humiliation awaits at every turn. Bogdanovich's movie doesn't move at the speed of the live performances of Noises Off that I have seen -- I'm not sure it could, without sacrificing comprehension. But it moves fast enough. If you can't laugh at Noises Off, you're just not mean enough. [21 March 1992, p.E1]

Seeing Noises Off the movie is better than waiting for it to arrive at the local dinner theater. But served in a setting devoid of spontaneity, Off just seems a little off. [20 March 1992, p.4D]

If you've ever been in a play, you may have a good time at Noises Off anyway. And what stage cast could top this one? Caine has rarely had a chance to display his versatility so entertainingly, Ritter always seems to blossom under Bogdanovich's direction, Elliott finds a surprising variety in his one-note part, while Hagerty makes the most of her oddly appealing brand of hysteria. [21 March 1992, p.C5]

What you’re left with is a lot of bustle and jabber, and occasional sparks from the cast. Caine has some fine comic moments of high exasperation, there’s great wit in the way Burnett arches her eyebrows and, as a besotted trouper, Denholm Elliott’s puttery calm is like a balm amid the delirium. It’s a delirium that finally seems more appropriate to the sitcom than to the stage. Read full review

There are a number of hefty laughs scattered throughout "Noises Off," Peter Bogdanovich's screen version of Michael Frayn's English stage farce. Yet there are nowhere near as many as the source material deserves and Mr. Bogdanovich's cast might otherwise have earned. Read full review

The performers all seem to be relishing this sendup, but we're always aware that it is a vehicle better suited to the stage. In trying to open it up some for the screen, Bogdanovich and scriptwriter Marty Kaplan have presented the original play as a series of flashbacks that come upon Caine as he sweats out the play's Broadway opening. All this does is slow the opening and delay the close. Read full review

Another theatrical metaphor fails to transfer to the screen. This adaptation of Michael Frayn's stage hit undoubtedly has its moments, but will still disappoint those who laughed themselves silly at the original. Read full review

Onstage, Noises Off was a riot. On film, it's in the salvage business, snatching a few vagrant laughs from a reworking that otherwise sinks like a failed souffle, reminding us yet again that farce onstage and farce on film are two fundamentally different constructs. [20 March 1992, p.30]

Very little sense of the performers' humanity emerges from behind their stage roles, perhaps because Bogdanovich has directed the supposedly spontaneous dialogue to sound just as forced and theatrical as the scripted lines. [20 March 1992, p.2]

It's not that Bogdanovich's movie doesn't have its laughs. It does. Frayn has a comic genius that is expansive -- he can pile one-liners, character humor and physical schtick on top of one another quickly and deftly. And the cast Bogdanovich has assembled, led by Michael Caine as the embattled director, is up to the demands. But a film version of a play about making a play? That's a step removed. It's a blanket that muffles the crispness of the play. A bridge too far. The mediation of the screen between us and the play about a play is unnecessary at best and a real bother at worst. [23 March 1992, p.C08]

The jokes start wearing thin, and most of the noisy characters become rather tedious well before the rag-bag of thesps finally pitch up on Broadway. Read full review

The charm of the film is that's it's so clever a play, but that cleverness wears thin quickly. Read full review

Aside from Caine (who must labor under some secret contract that forces him to appear in every movie made with an English-accented role), the all-star cast plays like an inside joke, more made-for-television than anything else. [20 March 1992, p.41]

Noisy and (nearly) awful, Noises Off is the sort of movie that gives filmed theater a bad name. Based on Michael Frayn's popular, Tony-nominated play, the screen version is so lame that even without having seen a stage production of the material I can tell that the film doesn't do it justice. Read full review